TWC Goes The 'If You Won't Have Me, You Won't Have Anyone' Route

Cold callers who work for cable service providers are known to be hard sellers, but Time Warner Cable stepped a few miles over the line by disconnecting a potential customer’s Verizon service and sending a technician to install TWC service — all this after the customer repeatedly turned down TWC’s overtures begging them to switch over.

John Bonomo, a Verizon spokesman, said the company received an order from Time Warner to disconnect the Bushes’ telephone services. Bonomo said that if a customer chooses another company for phone service, Verizon receives an order by computer and the existing service is turned off, without people actually speaking to each other.

“It appears that, somehow, an order got in our system to terminate them as Verizon customers, and that is not what they wanted,” Bonomo said.

A Time Warner spokeswoman said on Friday that the matter was being investigated and she could not comment on it.

Eventually the victims got service restored, but not before they suffered through a glitch that let them make but not accept calls.